Henri Charrière - Banco - the Further Adventures of Papillon

We had corresponded for five years; but even so wouldn't they be afraid of what people might say? Wouldn't they feel rather nervous about meeting an escaped ex-convict at a rendezvous in Spain?

I did not want them to come out of duty; I wanted them to come with their hearts full of genuine feeling for me.

Ah, but if they only knew… if they only knew-the coast was coming nearer slowly now, but how it had raced away from me twenty-six years ago-if they only knew how I had been with them all the time during those fourteen years of prison!

If only my sisters could see all the visions of our childhood I made for myself in the cells and the wild-beast cages of the Reclusion!

If only they knew how I kept myself going with them and with all those who made up our family, drawing from them the strength to beat the unbearable, to find peace in the midst of despair, to forget being a prisoner, to reject suicide-if they only knew how the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds of those years of total solitude and utter silence had been filled to overflowing with the smallest events of our wonderful childhood!

The coast drew nearer and nearer; we saw Barcelona: we were about to enter its harbor. I had a wild desire to cup my hands and shout, with all my strength, "Hey there! I'm coming! Come as fast as you can!" just as I used to call out to them when we were children in the fields of Fabras and I had found a great patch of violets.

"What are you doing here, darling? I've been looking for you this last hour. I even went down to the car."

Without getting up I put my arm round Rita's waist; she bent down and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. Only then did I realize that, although I was going to meet my people full of selfquestioning and full of questions to ask as well, there in my arms was my own private family, the family that I had founded and that had brought me to this point. I said, "Darling, I was living over the past again as I watched the land come closer, the land that holds my people, the living and the dead."

Barcelona: our gleaming car on the quay with all the baggage neatly in the trunk. We did not stay the night in the great city; we were impatient to drive on through the sunlit countryside toward the French frontier. But after two hours my feelings overcame me so that I had to pull in to the side of the road-I could not go on.

I got out of the car: my eyes were dazzled with looking at this landscape, these plowed fields, huge plane trees, trembling reeds, the thatched or tiled roofs of the farms and cottages, the poplars singing in the wind, the meadows with every possible shade of green, the cows with the bells tinkling as they grazed, the vines- ah, the vines with their leaves that could not hide all the grapes. This piece of Catalonia was exactly the same as all my French gardenlike landscapes: all this was mine and had been mine since I was born; it was among these same colors, these same growing things, these same crops that I had wandered hand in hand with my grandfather; it was through fields like these that I had carried my father's game bag when he went shooting and when we urged our bitch Clara to startle a rabbit or flush a covey of partridges. Even the fences around the farms were the same as they were at home! And the little irrigation canals with their planks set across here and there to guide the water into one field or another; I did not have to go up to them to know there were frogs that I could bring out, as many as I wanted, with a hook baited with a piece of red cloth, as I had done so often as a child.

And I quite forgot that this vast plain was Spanish, so exactly was it like the valley of the Ardèche or the Rhone.

We stopped at the hotel nearest the French frontier. The next day Rita took the train to fetch Tante Ju from Saint-Peray. I should have gone myself, but for the French police I was still a man who had escaped from Guiana. While Rita was away I found a very fine house at Rosas, right on the edge of the beach.

A few more minutes of waiting, Papi, and then you will see Tante Ju step out of the train, the woman who loved your father, and who wrote you such beautiful letters, bringing back to life your memories of those who loved you and whom you loved so much.

It was Rita who got out first. As carefully as a daughter, she helped her tall companion climb down to the platform. And then two big arms enfolded me, two big arms pressed me to her bosom, two big arms conveying the warmth of life and a thousand things that cannot be expressed in words. And it was with one arm around Rita and the other around my second mother that I walked out of the station, quite forgetting that suitcases do not come with their owners unless they are carried.

It was eleven in the morning when Rita and Tante Ju arrived, and it was three the next morning when Tante Ju went to her bedroom, worn out by the journey, by her age, by emotion and by sixteen hours of uninterrupted exchange of memories.

I fell into my bed and went straight to sleep, exhausted, without a breath of energy to keep me awake. The outburst of urgent happiness is as shattering as the worst disaster.

My two women were up before me, and it was they who pulled me out of my deep sleep to tell me it was eleven in the morning, that the sun was shining, the sky blue, the sand warm, that breakfast was waiting for me and that I should eat it quickly so as to go to the frontier to fetch my sister and her tribe, who were to be there in two hours. "Rather earlier," said Tante Ju, "because your brother-in-law will have been forced to drive fast, to keep the family from bullying him, they are so eager to see you."

I parked the Lincoln right next to the Spanish frontier post.

Here they were! They were on foot, running-they had abandoned my brother-in-law in his Citroën back there in the line by the French customs.

First came my sister Hélène, her arms out. She ran across the stretch of no-man's-land from the one post to the other, from France to Spain. I went toward her, my guts tied up with emotion. At four yards we stopped to look one another right in the face. Our tear-dimmed eyes said, "It is really her, my childhood Nène" and "It is really him, my little brother Riri from long ago." And we flung ourselves into each other's arms. Strange. For me this fifty-year-old sister was as she had always been. I did not see her aging face; I saw nothing except that the brilliant animation of her eyes was still the same and that for me her features had not altered.

Our embrace lasted so long we forgot all about the others. Rita had already kissed the children. I heard "How pretty you are, Aunt!" and I turned, left my Nène, and thrust Rita into her arms, saying, "Love her dearly, because it is she who has brought me to you all."

My three nieces were splendid and my brother-in-law was in great form. The only one missing was his eldest boy, Jacques, who had been called up for the war in Algeria.

We left for Rosas, the Lincoln in front, with my sister at my side. I shall never forget that first meal, with us all sitting at a round table. There were times when my legs trembled so that I had to take hold of them under the cloth.

1930-1956. So many, many things had happened, both for them and for me. I did not talk about the penal settlement during the meal. I just asked my brother-in-law whether my being found guilty had caused them a great deal of trouble and unpleasantness. He reassured me kindly, but I could feel how much they must have suffered, having a convict as brother and brother-inlaw.

No, I said nothing about prison, and I said nothing about my trial. For them and, I sincerely believe, for me, too, my life began the day when, thanks to Rita, I buried my old self, the man on the loose, to bring Henri Charrière back to life, the son of the Ardèche schoolteachers.